Solid State Drive Round-up: Intel, OCZ, G.Skill, and Super Talent

Today we will be looking at four popular mainstream SSD offerings: the G.Skill Titan 128GB, Intel X25-M 80GB, OCZ Vertex 120GB and the Super Talent UltraDrive ME 64GB. Although all these products are MLC flash-based and target the consumer enthusiast market, they do vary in price, on-board controllers, memory chips, and size caches, which should make for some very interesting results.

Let's move ahead as we discover what makes a great SSD drive and what's your best bet in today's market.

Really a great article. I haven't put much thought into SSD's as their prices are so high, but it looks like they're near affordable and awesome performance wise. It's also interesting to see the gaps in performance between the different models. I'm not sure why, but I was assuming that they'd all be on par with each other.

Any chance you could do some RAID 0 performance benchmarks? I'd be interested in RAID 1 and 5 as well, but with the MTBF being so high, it's probably not too important. I've been running WD Raptors in RAID 0 for almost 3 years now and wonder if there's any justification to upgrade to SSD RAID 0 or just JBOD from here on out.

Interesting article... but comparing the 64 GB Ultradrive with the 120 GB Vertex does not make sense. The speed of the Indilinx-based SSDs is quite different depending on capacity. So, the 120 GB Vertex is fastest, followed by the 250 GB model, then the 32 GB model, 60 GB is slowest. The same holds for the 128 GB, 256 GB, 32 GB and 64 GB variants of the Ultradrive. Therefore the test does not allow a conclusion that the Ultradrive is slower than the Vertex. It just confirms the differences between Indilinx Barefoot-based drives with different capacities.

Thank for the feedback PanicX and I agree some RAID0 testing would be interesting. This is something we will look to include in a future article. Obviously it means getting two of each drive which is not easy given how tight companies have to be with samples at the moment but we will work on it for you.

TortureTest it is always good to see a new name I am actually aware that the capacity has an impact on the performance. However based on our testing so far the impact is not that significant and although the Super Talent SSD was only slightly slower in some tests it really struggled in others such as the ATTO write test. If you have any real evidence of this please show us I would like to check it out.

Also at the end of the day Super Talent knew they were entering an SSD roundup against the OCZ Vertex and they sent a 64GB SSD to compete so they must have been fairly confident in its abilities. Finally we have seen massive, truly massive differences in performance between certain firmware updates so this just made more sense.

If you have any real evidence of this please show us I would like to check it out.

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I do not have several SSDs to compare myself. But the official OCZ Vertex 120 GB specs are 250 MB/s read, 180 MB/s write, 100 MB/s sustained write, while Vertex 60 GB specs are only 230 MB/s read, 135 MB/s write and 70 MB/s sustained write. This means that Vertex 60 GB will only offer 70-75% write performance compared to the 120 GB model. If you scale down the scores of the 120 GB Vertex accordingly, you will find that the UltraDrive is within this margin. Just to pick one example: for ATTO write with 128 KB files, the Vertex 120 GB achieved 200 MB/s. Scaling this down to 75% for the 60 GB model results in 150 MB/s, which is pretty close to the actual result of the UltraDrive 64 GB model.

As is my understanding, the Vertex, Supertalent and Patriot Torque all use the same hardware/controller..so its essentially the same thing.

Your speed differences come from the fact that you compared a 64GB to a 120GB drive, from what i read the 120GB are always a little faster than the 64GB drives. (Oh, and i see someone pointed this out already

While speed tests are great, reliability is an issue. Have two OCZ drives that have corrupted
the OS (win7 64) within 3 weeks of the install. Have tried them in two different PC's with the same end result. Ran memtest on both for 36 hours with no errors on either.
rig setup
EVGA P55 657FTW (A59 bios)
Corsair xms3 8 g memory (matched set) (1600 running at 1333)
Corsair 859 power supply
Geforce GTX275
Vertex 120g
Nothing but the OS installed

Second rig is the same except for
Vertex 60g in lieu of the 120
Corsair 4 gig dominator ram (1600)

While OCZ support has been good (rma'd the drives), I've spent more
on shipping than the drives cost (almost - FedEx).
Too bad there aren't tests to help define reliability better.